Examples of air quality measures near roads within Europe : national measures of the international CEDR air quaility group

In 2002, the international WERD (Western Europe Road Directors) organisation, subgroup Road Research agreed on the start of an international air quality platform for road directors. This seemed quite useful as national road directors within Europe faced the same problems regarding the feasability to meet the European air quality directives for 2005 (concerning Particulate matter) and 2010 (concerning NO2). The Dutch Road and Hydraulic Engineering Division (DWW) agreed to take the lead in the organisation of this process. The platform consists for the moment of nine active member states. For future projects, national road directors of EU countries, which have not participated so far in the air quality group, are welcomed to join the group. This report is the first joint product of the air quality platform, with contributions from Austria, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The main goal of the report is to combine national experiences with measures to improve the air quality near highways. This report does certainly not claim to address every known measure, but hopes to give an overview of some national efforts and experiments to improve the local air quality. For the purpose of this report, it was decided to describe not only effective air quality measures, but also the ones that were found not to work at all. The participating organisations to the CEDR air quality group made their own choice in the topics to be described. Each organisation stays responsible for the content and quality of their contribution. Each contributor was asked to describe one measure extensively (more than 5 pages) with a reader in mind who is not familiar with the local or national situation. Next to the long contributions, contributors could voluntarily describe one or more other measures shortly in order to possibly inspire readers. The respective concept chapters were peer-reviewed within the group. In 2004, the umbrella organisation of the WERD group is extended with the inclusion of Eastern European countries into the EU. Hence, the name of the group is adapted to the new situation into CEDR (Conference of European Directors of Roads) as CEDR air quality group.